I just always assumed this was the case, since everyone talks about wanting to hire only "A" engineers.

But I'm not so sure we Americans should be "offended" by this. This article says:

> The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up. But Silicon Valley doesn't want to just come out and say this, since it will sound offensive to a lot of American-born grads.

I mean, of course, only 5% of American engineers are going to be in the top 5% of American engineers, for example. It's not a national failure. It's not offensive. That's the entire conversation about "A" engineers. Any country needs to look outside its borders for additional top engineers.

Then, the article goes on to paraphrase Silicon Valley:

> "Hey America, please raise the visa limit. There's a shortage of STEM talent that is willing to work for what we'll pay that also meets our high standards.

I'm not really convinced that pay has anything to do with it. The general problem really seems to genuinely be finding engineers that are good enough, just in the recruitment process period -- at least in many cases.

The article tries to use statistics to show that some STEM majors go on to other fields. But saying that 18.7% of CS majors aren't working in their field because of pay/promotion/working conditions doesn't strike me as unreasonable at all. I mean, maybe they're the "C" engineers or something, and they decided they're better at something else. Or they just enjoy something else more. The article certainly isn't proving that they're the "A" engineers everybody wants, and that they've gone on to brain surgery instead because that's more lucrative and has better working conditions.